"Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. ", This attitude that men are fun but dumb, women are smart but strident, a view of the sexes that seems to come straight out of a Judd Apatow film led to various quotes of hers that some like to twist into proof that Thatcher was an unwitting feminist. The last remnants of the postwar consensus were swept away in the ensuing decade a period that saw the crushing of the trade unions, the Big Bang in the City, council house sales, the privatisation of large chunks of industry, the encouragement of inward investment, tax cuts, attempts to roll back the state, a deep manufacturing recession, a boom in North Sea oil production, and support for the creation of a single market in Europe. But now the history was what mattered. Everything has its season. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. Thatcher's title is Baroness. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, Perhaps this is unsurprising: four years ago Ed Miliband sneered at "nudge" economics as something "very fashionable in the Guardian for a few months before the financial crisis". The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. Accounts vary. Where copyright is the problem, the full text can be found on the Complete Books by Margaret Thatcher (Author of The Downing Street Years) - Goodreads The endemic worklessness of her era was never repaired now her successors blame the victims. In 1980, I made several fast round trips to London, Paris and Bonn, and, on each occasion, had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher. Toastmasters International -Famous Speechwriters But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. . It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: One also can't forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher worldfamous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. She invited the In the pantheon of this comedian's attacks on Thatcher, it was a retort that probably won't be treasured longer than the best lines from The Young Ones. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. speaking in March 2002.). Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. The items stored in this section of the site are texts, but many of the most important statements are also available in audio or video form in the separate Multimedia section. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. She became harder than hard. Sunstein worked for a Democratic president, but did not meet the Labour leader or key advisers. Privatisation did not feature in the Conservative election campaign, while the tougher approach to trade union reform had only really become evident since the winter of discontent, and even then was a gradual process. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination. John O'Sullivan (columnist) - Wikipedia Would we like her back? Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. defended Ronald Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. Thatcher's Bruges speech 'not anti-EU' - former aide - BBC News Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony. No homeless or disabled people need beg on the streets. The current crop of leaders are so dull, so ill-defined, so lacking in personality that it's almost impossible for comedians to rage against them. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. Chavez was indeed a divisive and controversial figure, and it would have been reckless to conceal that fact out of some misplaced deference to the grief of his family and supporters. This zest for ideas was boosted by the 2010 intake, which comprises just under half the parliamentary party. In 11 years, Thatcher promoted only one woman to her cabinet, preferring instead to elevate men whom Spitting Image memorably and, in certain instances, accurately, described as "vegetables". The cautious tactician was suppressed. Sue Gray has shown the dangers of thinking officials are more ethical You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. Great speeches: Margaret Thatcher | World | The Guardian Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. 100% Success rate. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. The best books on Margaret Thatcher - Five Books It made minor savings at best and was, as the . That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off. If You Want Anything Said Ask a Man, Want Anything Done Ask a Woman The welfare state, with its unemployment and housing benefits and free healthcare, actually protected wages: employers could not force workers to accept low pay or unpaid overtime because of the job's healthcare provision, as they do in the US. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." She gave it her best shot. My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.". When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, "Property of the GPO." Statistics now confirm what many people have always recognised: that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. Speech: 07:39-28:33 Q & A: 28:34-48:08 (Recording ends abruptly during Q&A) Topics of . One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. It still does. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. Critical Commentary: Margaret Thatcher outlined the British policy in relation to various world issues. Out!" To project the ideas of strength and . Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. What, in retrospect, seems creative and what destructive? The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. She added layers of her own to this intimacy, directing the creation of a single European market that surrendered important national powers to the collective. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. The fact is that if both sides removed their ideological blinkers, as Thatcher, remarkably perhaps, managed to do, then her trilogy of speeches in the late 1980s still offer some of the best and . The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. departing Downing Street on 28 November. To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. . declared that she wanted our money back. It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. Faced down trade union leaders after her early years apprentice years, when Jim Callaghan's Britain was falling apart in which the commonest fear was that the little lady would not be able to deal with them across the table. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Texts for listed statements are available on the site in almost 70 per Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. Understandably, less cohesive societies with more drugs, more crime and lower mobility waste talent, and are not good places to do business. Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. During the speech, . What's more, it was moulded to the wall as one commentator recalled and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. Rhetorical Analysis Of Ronald Reagan's Speech | ipl.org There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. Gloves. So we agreed to reactivate the back channel. This site follow the same rules (and shares an editor). She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. A week later she spoke Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. What was it about Thatcher that inspired a generation of comics to rage at her? On 30 October 1990 she made the first of the For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. Margaret Thatcher's Climate Change Of Heart | HuffPost Impact It was all very well for me to write books. It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. (MT gave up public It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain | The New Yorker I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. She was a gentle and peaceable woman my mother, that is and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona for what she was. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. Thank you, too, Margaret. Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She certainly was divisive, bisecting the country politically and geographically: hard-hit regions in the north of England, Wales and Scotland may be notably less civil in their farewells. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. In the early 1980s, the Republican party joined with other moderate and conservative parties in the world to form the International Democrat Union. But unlike Thatcher, president Hugo Chvez of Venezuela, the "president of the poor", fought for a caring economy and against the rule of the market. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told Here shovels the earth during a tree-planting ceremony . Alamat kami. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us". When she walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. How many Oscars does Meryl Streep have? - sportskeeda.com But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. This does lead to divisions. We still live in the land Margaret built. The tragic upshot has been the steep erosion of wages for the powerless bottom half, as income, wealth and property is sucked up to the top. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. M argaret Thatcher does an awful lot of crying in The Crown. The woman, however, changed. A Labour veteran blamed another legacy of Thatcher: the need for iron discipline after the media onslaught that engulfed her opponents. She was propped up by police who were encouraged to brutality against not only strikers but communities of colour, already hardest hit by unemployment: police powers were enhanced and their racism given free rein, especially with stop and search; CS gas was used on the mainland for the first time. These talks, sometimes joined by the prime minister and run by his aide Rohan Silva, show the restless search for new ideas that still grips the right, one of the least recognised legacies of Margaret Thatcher. And that made it easy to mock her. Reagan, who had recently left office as governor of California, was in London to deliver a speech to the Pilgrim Society. Tasteless." Large parts of society never recovered, while Germany and other countries managed the transition without such brutality. for turning. She was, of course, the first and so far only female British prime minister, Jon Snow reiterated on Monday night, insinuating that this achievement should in general be celebrated, never mind the specifics of her leadership. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, "across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.". It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. Thirdly, industrial policy was all but abandoned. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. But we reckoned we got Thatcher only too well and didn't like what we saw, far less what we heard. The Texan who stole the show at Margaret Thatcher's funeral She worked to enhance its corporate power. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. Until her final poll-tax hubris, she knew when swerving was the better part of valour and despite that famous one-liner, she was sometimes for turning. Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her.
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